Service technology -- from SOA to cloud to IT service management -- promises many "-ilities": greater agility, flexibility, and reusability. Joe McKendrick explores the challenges and opportunities with service orientation, and how to capitalize on these emerging computing philosophies.
Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant and speaker specializing in trends and developments shaping the technology industry.
Redmond is revving up. This year, the folks from Microsoft intend to launcha new version of their customer relationship management software, Microsoft CRM, based on the principles of service-oriented architecture.
Ok, ok, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) may have "issues," asmy skeptical co-blogger has just pointed out. It mayeven be quite a while before it enables business analysts to simply draw up new IT-enabled business processes on the fly with cool visual tools.
Is application integration really worth it? Does it really matter if a customer service rep only has to make a single inquiry on one application, versus pulling down data from two systems?
CNET's Martin LaMonica just published this very insightful overview of how some industry players want to address XML's increasingly sluggish performance. Some would even call it an impending performance crisis.
The world seems to be warming up to Business Process Execution Language, or BPEL. It's a specification with a lot of promise, and BPEL scripts will be the key to actually coupling (in a loose way, of course) Web services.
At the Application Integration and Web Services Summit last May, Gartner analyst Roy Schulte called "event-driven architecture" the "next big thing." Indeed, he predicted more than 67% of new large-scale application systems would "emit" business events by 2008.
A reader (no doubt frustrated by all the SOA hype) observes that Dictionary.com produces many definitions for the acronym "SOA.
BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is "a language for describing Web service orchestration in terms of stateful, long-running interactions consisting of synchronous and asynchronous message exchanges," explains Jim Clune of Parasoft. "It supplies a notion of abstract processes to describe externally visible behavior as well as executable processes, which can be run either by some interpreter or by compiling them into some executable form.
An interesting announcement just came out of IBM today. Namely, Big Blue is publicly pledging that 500 of its patents will be made available for use in open source software projects.
Since XML and Web services (which are written in XML) is comprised of human-readable text, many in the industry are concerned that we face an imminent performance crisis across the network. As described in this recent article in NetworldWorld Fusion, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on new specifications that enable the binary encoding of XML within SOAP messages.